How AEO Changes Partnerships with Guy Yalif

Guy Yalif (00:00):

Great SEO is a fantastic headstart for AEO. Your SEO agency is your AEO agency because the core skills for this are that. I've heard some say, "Well, how do you create content now for both?" There's not some huge divergence in content, I don't think. You fundamentally are sharing the same thing in an engaging way, in a clear and structured way.

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Tyler Calder (00:22):

This is Get It, Together, the podcast where partnership and go-tomarket leaders share the real stories behind programs they've built and scaled. In this episode of Get It Together, I chat with Guy from Webflow and we get into all things answer engine optimization, or as I often call it, simply AI visibility. We get into the nitty-gritty, we get into the tactics that are working, we get into some of the misconceptions, and we get into why this is such a critical moment for brands to be taking this seriously. If you could rewind to the early days of search and cement your place at the top of Google, you would absolutely jump at that opportunity. That's the moment we're in right now, solidifying your visibility within the LLMs. I hope you enjoy. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Get It Together. Today, I am with Guy Yalif, who I am super excited to be chatting with.

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(01:24):

He is currently over at Webflow. Guy, welcome. I'd love to chat a little bit about your background, because it's super interesting. I very much deliberately did not introduce you with great detail because I'd love to chat about your beginning story as what I believe to be true is an aerospace engineer turned marketer. Let's start there. Welcome.

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Guy Yalif (01:49):

Tyler, awesome to connect with you again. Thank you very much for having me. And yeah, I made the straight line journey from aerospace engineer to CMO as one does, right? As one does. Yeah.

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Tyler Calder (02:02):

Perfect.

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Guy Yalif (02:03):

I had the privilege of being a kid in a candy store, thinking about designing airplanes. Actually spent half of college coding AI to design airplanes, and then small world, that becomes a thing. Spent 10 years building and leading product teams, 10 years building and leading marketing teams. 15 of those 20 were an ad tech, and then had the privilege a decade ago of being co-founder and CEO of AI MarTech company that used machine learning to personalize websites, literally down to the individual. And we were acquired by Webflow year and a half ago.

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Tyler Calder (02:35):

Perfect. Amazing. And now talk to us a little bit about the role at Webflow.

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Guy Yalif (02:41):

What does that look like? The answer to the question of what do we do with an acquired CEO? Started with, we were the company's first acquisition ever and we were not looking to sell, but the three of us had the privilege of seeing M&A on both sides, like at Twitter, BrightRoll, Yahoo, and a bunch of other places. The strategic and cultural fits with Webflow were amazing, which allowed us, the first part of the job, integrate the products, actually integrate them. As fellow CEMO, former CMO, I'm used to everybody lying to me all the time. We actually integrated them, which was great. Had a very visible deadline with company, big annual conference six months later. Then what? The reason the strategic fit was so strong is Webflow very thoughtfully listened to customers. And this was the number one ask. They said, "Hey, you help me, Webflow, me, marketer, create these visually stunning, emotionally evocative, engaging sites.

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(03:39):

They build my brand beautifully. I also want to go drive some revenue." And so they decided they wanted to buy someone, build my partner. They were doing that trade-off. And we then help them. Now it's all we do testing, do personalization, do account-based marketing, use AI to personalize to the individual. And so now the value prop is build your brand, drive revenue, code as much or as little or zero as you want.

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Tyler Calder (04:04):

Very cool. And so now as chief evangelist, what is it that you're out there evangelizing?

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Guy Yalif (04:12):

So Webflow is the first company, the only company I've ever worked for where I wasn't CEO where building brand is a company level OKR. And they basically said, "Hey, look, you've spent 20 plus years being and working with CMOs. Go build our brand with marketing leaders." And so literally my OKRs are like brand awareness. Sales will pull me in to help on individual deals. There it is driving revenue, but it's purely adding value into the market for the sake of added value. And if folks are like, "Oh, you work for Webflow. What do they do? " Success, which is a fun thing to be able to do, especially in this unique moment in time where all of our learning curves, including those of us who are a little further in our careers is like this. We haven't had that for a little while and that's really cool to be able to spend the time to do this and talk about it.

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Tyler Calder (05:05):

Yeah, that's awesome. I want to dive right into what will be the meat of the conversation, which is all things AEO. I think Webflow, and don't take this the wrong way, seemingly kind of came out of nowhere and all of a sudden started to have this incredible educational sort of story that where they were telling out in the market that very quickly evolved to be more than just a story. It was actual tangible insight into how to take advantage of the moment, how to improve AI visibility. I'd love to hear what got Webflow to that place to say, "Hey, you know what? This is an area that we can really stake and help elevate the IQ of the market around all things AI visibility." Where'd that come from?

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Guy Yalif (05:53):

Transparently in the market. I had the privilege in this job of speaking to hundreds of CMOs every quarter and AI started coming up in every conversation. Now we're like, "Duh, of course it did." And then AEO started coming up in every conversation. Now we're like, "Duh, of course it did." But earlier on it was, wow, this really is like the early OOs in search where our brand and our revenue are under threat. I think in early days of search, it was more just revenue, but now our brand narratives are too. So we leaned into it some. And at some point Webflow was like, "Hey, you've spent 17, 18 years in and out of search. Go dive into this more deeply. Go from good knowledge to leading edge and full transparency. I was brainstorming with our head of comms, Steph Donnelly, what are some stories we could tell out in market?" And we thought we could go lean into AEO.

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(06:50):

And so that weekend created a maturity model to try to take all the different things we were hearing out in market plus more and lay out, "Hey, how do we all tackle this in an actionable way for CMOs, operators, technical, SEOs?" And leaned in from there. And the best five webinars the company's ever done were the last five. They were all on AEO.

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Tyler Calder (07:11):

Very cool. I'll come back to the maturity model because I really want to unpack that and go through it. But you said something that I don't know I've heard anybody articulate the way you just did. And so let me say it back and see if I understood what you were saying. So you mentioned brand and revenue. And so early days of SEO, it was revenue, right? Everybody saw this as a huge opportunity to drive organic traffic that had intent that you could then convert. It became such a strong engine for so many businesses, but not as big on the brand side. You're suggesting with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, more impact to the brand. Is that something that folks should be paying a little bit more attention to as why this moment is even that much more elevated than the SEO moment? It's a revenue opportunity, but you also got AI telling your own brand story, and if you're not helping influence it the right way, it can kind of go in directions that maybe you don't want the brand to go.

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(08:19):

Is that sort of what you're alluding to? Did I capture that?

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Guy Yalif (08:23):

Spot on. Exactly what you said. For those that went through the search genesis, like John Batelle famously said, I think it was in 03, maybe earlier, Google is the database of intentions and there was incredible, just as you're saying, commercial intent and signal sitting in that database of intentions. And so we all, it was a CMO, it was a company level issue for multiple years, and now it's matured. And now SEO, I think, is a CMO level issue if you're a traffic arbitrage business or if that particular channel is not working, otherwise it's the channel. And now I feel like AEO is like the early days of search where it's a company level issue. It's discussed in boardrooms. To your point about brand, I think we all looked at search as a performance medium, which it certainly is. I think over time we have come to appreciate it absolutely can influence brand and we were able to buy on ... We were able to run the economics a bit differently when our goal was brand.

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(09:24):

It's more that LLMs, for exactly why you said, Tyler, because they are reformulating our carefully crafted, carefully differentiated language that we work so hard to have our team say consistently everywhere, and then they are sometimes just listing a bunch of features, leaving out our value prop or confidently getting it wrong or leaving us out entirely that there's brand threat in a way there wasn't with search because Google was using our words by linking to our sites.

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Tyler Calder (09:54):

Yeah, I think that's powerful. I think that is not a differentiator that I've heard well articulated, and I think it's a critical one for people to understand. I think that's great. Let's maybe step back. What is AEO? What are we even talking about?

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Guy Yalif (10:10):

AEO, also sometimes called GEO or AIO is ultimately like what we were trying to do with SEO. Our prospects are looking somewhere for information relevant to buying us. We want to be there and have them come to us and buy more of us. That's it. That's the heart of it. And SEO was doing that in search. AEO is doing that in answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and more.

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Tyler Calder (10:38):

And are you using AEO, GEO, AIO interchangeably? Do you have separate definitions for them? We

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Guy Yalif (10:46):

As Webflow chose AEO in this evolving space, and if the industry settles on GEO or something else, we'll adjust. So in this 3O of made up words, and I know there are others out there, I feel parallels to AI and ML. You talk to a data scientist, ML is a subset of AI. There is a difference, but practically, in particular, us as marketers, it's like we use them interchangeably. I think folks who are trying to draw a distinction between AEO and GEO saying, "Hey, generative is beyond answer engines. It's everywhere." But ultimately the goal is to show up and have people come to your site. And so I've seen more practically people using them interchangeably. Okay, so then why AEO? Well, when we did SEO, we were talking about the experience we were searching. We didn't talk about Google's underlying tech. Well, answers are the experience.

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(11:36):

Generative is the underlying tech. And so that's why we thought AEO made more sense if the world, as I've said, ends up somewhere else, we'll go there. Sure. Very fair. Cool. That's great. What are you using? Which one have you settled on?

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Tyler Calder (11:52):

I personally tend to just say AI visibility. I think of the terms, I tend to default to AEO if I'm not saying AI visibility, but I do find myself in a lot of conversations around, well, why isn't it GEO? Why isn't it AIO? I think AIO is the one that certainly kind of stands on its own and has a clear definition than AEO versus GEO. But I think AEO is where we've generally landed with periodic debate, if that works. We have it internally too. Perfect. I want to talk about two things. So the maturity model is one which you've already mentioned, but before that is sort of the four pillars of AEO I've heard you and Webflow chat about. You've talked about content, you've talked about technical, you've talked about authority, you've talked about measurement. Let's go through them if you're okay with that, starting with the content category.

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(12:54):

What does that look like? What about content changes? If anything, how should we be thinking about content today, maybe differently than we have in the past or lean into the similarities?

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Guy Yalif (13:06):

Those four categories are our suggestion for how CMOs and teams should think about the expansion from SEO to AEO, not the complete shift, but this is a way you could structure work for your team. The team could then go structure work themselves in these four categories. And so for content, as we think about the evolution, we're all dutifully creating content that Google will like, that has the right keywords in it. And our topical model is a bunch of keywords. We have baskets of keywords we are optimizing for. That shifts for answer engines to groups of questions our prospects are asking through the funnel. And as we think about, okay, well, questions, do we want to create content to answer? I offer for folks to go run an LLM over your sales call recordings, over your sales emails, go look at Google's people also asked. Also just reflect because you know a bunch of the questions people are asking and then go answer those.

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(14:09):

Go answer them a few and then go over as you mature more comprehensively at different stages of the funnel because that question means different things at different stages of the funnel and then make sure it's relevant, make sure it's personalized so you're delivering the right content. And as if the content machine wasn't hungry enough, keep it updated because ChatGPT, 95% of their citations were to content that's been updated in the last 10 months. Content with a freshness signal like last updated gets 1.8x more citations. At Webflow, Vivian, who runs our SEO AEO team 5Xed the speed of refreshing content. That resulted for that content in 42% more traffic and that traffic converted 14% better than unbranded SEO. So what's not to love? More and it converts better? Great.

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Tyler Calder (15:08):

So there's a couple of things in there I'd love to comment on. So one is, and I'll mention the tech that we use. We use Gong, we use attention.com if folks are familiar with them, both for analyzing call recordings, but exactly what you just said. A lot of what we'll look at is just jumping into all of our sales calls, all of our customer success calls and pull out what are the most common questions, and then we'll start to build content around it. And the great thing now that we're able to layer on some AI support or little robot friends, it just becomes so much easier to do some of what you said, like helping assess, okay, what part of the funnel are these questions popping up? What personas are typically asking these questions? There's just a lot that we can do with that to inform our content.

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(16:01):

So I certainly do love that. And then very tactically, your comment on freshness. So is the advice there not only to make sure that your content is being refreshed appropriately, but is it to actually stamp the content, have a date on that piece of content that says updated on X date or do you need to do that at all? The LLM will realize when it was updated.

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Guy Yalif (16:28):

The data that we saw, I could go find the source I don't remember it off the top of my head, was that having that be visible. Maybe it's sitting in schema, metadata, maybe it's on the page visible, causes 1.8x more citations. You, by the way, mentioned, "Hey, we get help from our AI friends." Fortunately, it seems based on data from our friends at Graphite, that the temptation to then say, "Great, I'll create infinite content and just spam it out there is not working." That 85% of AI content in Google is either entirely human, that's 69%, or human plus a little bit of AI, that's another 16%. And as a marketer, I am happy that we will hopefully skip that stage, both because the LLMs are iterating very quickly and because they have more signal about what's good content than searched us. Cool.

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Tyler Calder (17:24):

I'm going to move on to the next part of the framework in a second, but you just said good content, which is something I've always latched onto growing up in the SEO world way back in the day. How would you attempt to articulate what good content is today?

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Guy Yalif (17:41):

I think it is what it always should have been. Namely, you are delivering something that is genuinely valuable to your prospect. They've got some needs, some questions, some curiosity. You are genuinely helping them with that, and it's related to something you have the right to talk about. And by the right, I mean Google's E-A-T Mental Model, where you've got the experience, the expertise, the authority, and the trustworthiness. So that taking on HubSpot who famously built an enormously successful inbound machine and then saw some drops in traffic, I'm going to make up the example, but it's in the right direction of if HubSpot is writing about how to grow your career, they'll get less credit than if they write about CRMs. I think that's great advice.

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Tyler Calder (18:28):

You mentioned schemas, so let's get into the second category or the second pillar, technical. What does that mean? Why is it important? What should we be thinking about?

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Guy Yalif (18:38):

Another parallel to the early days of search. Early on, Google had a hard time understanding the meaning of your site. And so the more you could make it clear for them, the more likely they were to crawl you, consume your content, and index you, make you available when people searched for something. We've been doing that in metadata, content that the machines see, but the humans don't, but it's present on the page for a long time. We have search metadata entitle and description. We have Facebook's OpenGraph and others. Schema is made up metadata structure that is aimed at helping LLMs understand the structure and meaning of content of our site. And that's the ultimate goal of the technical work is to help them understand that structure and meaning. It's the biggest one. And a few startups came up with it. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, and others four or five years ago.

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(19:32):

If you've got a Google knowledge graph entity presence, it almost certainly was driven by you having schema and it really helps 73% of first page results from Google have schema, but it's early days and there's huge opportunity because 88% of sites do not have schema. And by the way, that's why I was over the moon when our product team built site-wide auto-generated schema, because it's one of the few times where for it to work, you genuinely need a marketer and a developer, and to be able to let the marketer run is a great thing.

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Tyler Calder (20:11):

So Webflow will auto create very specific schemas across your website.

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Guy Yalif (20:16):

Webflow auto creates schema, looking at your page and deciding which one to use. And by which one, I mean exactly what you're referring to. Here's schema for a product page, for a persona page and so on. It'll pick the right one, populate it. If you've got a CMS collection, it'll auto-populate each page individually. By the way, also autocreate sitemap.xml to help show the structure of your site, robots.text to say what's important to crawl, support llms.text and more so that you can just signal to the LLMs, "Hey, here's what's important. Here's the structure of my site. Here's how to understand it, " which is really the biggest thing. By the way, then in the technical category, you want to make sure that's happening on super fast sites globally. You want that to happen automatically. And then at the highest level of maturity, space is changing every few months.

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(21:09):

And so really it's a little bit of bobbin and weaving as things are changing like LLMs.text makes a lot of sense. There's no evidence that the LLMs are using it yet, but it's a proposed standard. We support it. There's an MCP. We have an MCP server, which is for folks that may not already. It's like an API for an LLM. And so you can, as a marketer, go to an LLM and say, "I want to create a blog about this. " Great. Now, can you post that? And through the MCP, you now have a blog that's up and running or another page that's up into webflow.

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Tyler Calder (21:42):

Very cool. Those stats you shared, I had no idea. So few websites were taking advantage of schemas.

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Guy Yalif (21:50):

Shocking. I don't know why, but my best guess is for it to work, you truly do need a marketer and a developer available talking at the same time. And organizationally, that doesn't happen very often.

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Tyler Calder (22:02):

Yeah, no, I would align with that hypothesis based on my experience for sure. Cool. Let's talk about the third pillar authority. I know you'll have a lot to say on it. What I'm very curious on is the differentiation as a pillar between the content category.

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Guy Yalif (22:20):

At the highest level, the content category is about the content you own. People primarily think about their website. You do own content in some other places too. And the authority category is about earned brand mentions, primarily off your site. By the way, the quality of your site and how engaged people are on it also contribute to authority. But content is primarily about owned, authority is primarily about earned.

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Tyler Calder (22:44):

Okay. And if I step back into my old school SEO days, we always and still do talk about on page versus off page. It sounds somewhat similar here on page in this framework being your content and the technical piece, off page being this authority piece. Way back in the early days, we used to talk about the weighting was 70% off page, 30% on page, roughly in that range. Do you see any similar stats, evidence to suggest things are weighted one way versus another when it comes to AI visibility? I have not

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Guy Yalif (23:19):

Seen stats from anyone anywhere on it yet. My perception is that unlike search where authority takes a while to build up, you need the backlinks and more because the LLMs are running a search almost every single query now, and of course that'll change, but right now they are. You can have an impact this afternoon. Vivian, again, our SEO/AEO lead, took our top six product pages just as a start, not because that was the whole universe and added to our discussion about tech, FAQs at the bottom, which is another way to show structure, bullets, FAQs, author bios and so on. She put schema on those. In two weeks, more than half the incremental mentions Webflow got were from those six pages and we have thousands of pages and those pages got 24% more traffic in two weeks. In SEO land, how hard do we fight and claw for one ranking higher?

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(24:16):

And so to me, it's like there's this, like any new media, search, mobile, social, there are bargains to be had in terms of the amount of effort you put in and the amount you get out while this is a new medium. So

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Tyler Calder (24:30):

FAQs on your product pages for sure. We've seen similar evidence and we're scaling that out on our side. What are some other kind of in the moment immediate opportunities you suggest people should really be diving into taking advantage of? And I think the thing to be said is before the opportunity passes, before you're five years late to the SEO party, so you're looking at 12, 18 months before you see any impact. That's not right now. To your point, you can see impact pretty quick, days, weeks. What are some of those quick opportunities?

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Guy Yalif (25:05):

Across all of the categories, I would humbly suggest number one is to go shift from building content around keywords to answering questions. If you've done that, I would then consider adding structure metadata, schema being the biggest one. If you've done that, I would then go think seriously about the authority category where the value of plain text mentions links optional is higher than it was in search because it's like teaching your kids something. Every one of those mentions is like another repetition for the LLM to go see that. And so having widespread positive mentions of your content on other sites is really valuable and can impact authority quickly. Ideally, your content is thought leading and other people are referring to it. Ideally, you're talking about stuff you have authority on. And I'm guessing this is something you have a point of view on because when I think about this, it's a little bit the modern version of backlinks.

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(26:05):

Affiliates people often think about as paid only, but you really can have a whole other set of relationships

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Tyler Calder (26:11):

With them, can't you? Thank you for setting me up for this one. Absolutely. It's a conversation that at PartnerStack we find ourselves having more and more, which is the shift from kind of a single value prop of affiliate partners. And I know the word affiliate means so many different things to so many people, and in some cases it has a negative connotation to it. I view an affiliate as somebody who has authority in a certain area and is writing content to help elevate that area, elevate that space. They have educational things to say and they're out there saying it. For sure they're monetizing it, absolutely. But I think the word affiliate and the negative connotations that come with it, I mean, they're 20 years old, right? You're thinking about people that are just spamming coupon sites or forums or just email blasts over and over and over again.

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(27:07):

But what we're seeing out of our affiliate partners in our network, really, really solid creators with a very strong understanding of the market they play in. So with that long-winded context, what we're seeing with affiliate is the main value prep has always been you pay for performance, and that performance could be traffic, but more often than not, it is paying for a qualified lead or rev share. And it's a great model, right? It's kind of a win-win for everybody, but there's a lot of other value props beyond just, oh, affiliates, just tactically help us build pipeline, help us drive revenue, important things. But what we find is affiliates can help with moving into new geographic markets and help you build your brand there, can help you move into new buying groups, help you move upmarket, downmarket, and now helping with AI visibility. So they have authoritative websites, authoritative digital properties, maybe a YouTube channel, a newsletter, and working with affiliates to get the right type of content created and placed.

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(28:14):

To your point in terms of speed, we're seeing it impact and influence AI visibility within days, maybe weeks. It's a huge shift in how people are looking at working with these types of partners, which I think is a pretty big shift for the affiliate space. I'm going to stop talking because you're the guest, so I'm going to ...

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Guy Yalif (28:32):

That was my- No, no, no, no, no. I'm happy to be having the conversation, and I must admit it's like an eye-opener. This is so important in this day and age, and to have that relationship, a different dimension to the relationship is so powerful. And I observe data that says the LLMs, they're sending traffic to a longer tail. And so there are folks you may not have thought about in this way that now you would. They're sending traffic to 2.5x the number of domain search is, which means that there are folks who are affiliates, folks that wish they were, but haven't been able to garner the traffic to do that, for whom this can be an impactful revenue stream for them and valuable for the brands.

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Tyler Calder (29:11):

Yeah. I think what you just hit on is also, it is a very interesting time for the affiliate, influencer, creator space because if you didn't have a ton of traffic, if you didn't have a really strong healthy domain authority, as an affiliate, you're probably not going to get a lot of brands that want to work with you because the lead volume, the sales volume, probably not going to be there. As credible as you might be in your space and what you're writing about as that creator, as that affiliate, that influencer, getting a brand to care unless you have that high domain authority, high traffic volume, it was tough. Now, it is such a moment for the mid and long tail for exactly what you say. The LLMs are seeing this content, they're citing it, they're referencing it, It is a huge opportunity on all fronts.

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(30:03):

So I think you're banging on with that. Let's talk about measurement. It's your fourth pillar. How should people be thinking about measuring this?

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Guy Yalif (30:11):

People like saying a lot of black and white things about AEO, but really it's an evolution of SEO. Measurement's the one place where it is black and white because the concept of traditional keyword rankings, it just doesn't exist because it's not our content. It's a paragraph of reformulated content. Okay, so how do you measure basically the same concept? Am I showing up and how well am I showing up when it's paragraphs of text? We surveyed 400 marketers and they started I think where one should, and then there's more beyond that. They said, all right, first I'm using my existing in- house analytics tool to see how much traffic am I getting from LLMs? At Webflow, 8% of our self-serve signups come from LLM referred traffic. Then they're seeing, how's it performing? At Webflow, that traffic converts 6X better than unbranded search, not 6%, six times better.

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(31:04):

I've not spoken to a single CMO who didn't say it's performing a whole lot better conversion wise because they're further down the funnel. They've had more of a conversation. Semrush and Ahrefs found that to be 4X to 23X. Okay. Also, both of these are the analytics tools. Then I see people going to one of the many new tools or semichannel Ahrefs, which are both playing here too, to say, "For this topic that I care about, these questions that I want to be in the answers for, am I showing up? What are my total mentions?" Then they mature to, what's my share of voice relative to my competitors? And then to what's the sentiment? Am I being mentioned positively, which is a whole concept that just didn't exist in search because our words were being used. And finally, is it accurate? Again, a concept that didn't exist before because our stuff wasn't being reformulated.

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(31:55):

So at the highest level, you're measuring share of voice, sentiment and accuracy. What about referral traffic from the LLMs?

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Guy Yalif (32:02):

That should be the very first thing you're measuring to see how much traffic is it. For Webflow, if you look just at unbranded search and LLM referral traffic, July of 24, LLMs were basically zero. They were 1%. Your older clock forward 12 months to June of 25, there were 42%. Not of all of our traffic, but of LLM plus organic search. And both had grown during that time, but it's meaningful. I don't know if you're seeing something similar.

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Tyler Calder (32:30):

Almost the exact same. When I look at our referral traffic, it was basically non-existent early 2024, started to really pick up in May and June of 2024. More than a year later, it's a pretty meaningful slice of our referral traffic, but not only that. We hear it mentioned in our Gong calls quite a bit. So when a salesperson asks, "Oh, hey, how did you hear about us?" It's like, "Oh, I was doing my research in ChatGPT. You folks came up as the number one recommendation in every prompt. So figured I should give you a call." And it's interesting that us being pretty regularly referenced as the number one option for B2B partnerships is really a byproduct of all of the SEO work that we've done for the past four years. And so maybe that leads to my next question. You go on LinkedIn, and let's be honest, LinkedIn is what it is, a little bit of an echo chamber, a little bit of a crapshoot on what is good advice versus maybe poor advice.

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(33:38):

But one of the conversations you see happening is, oh, this is like SEO. This is the same story. The tactics are pretty similar. It's not a huge shift. And then you have people saying, "If that's your take, you're an idiot and you're probably not going to survive this moment. They're completely different." You can probably guess my perspective that we're somewhere in the middle. Do you have a take on that? How close is this to what we saw with SEO and the tactical execution of those practices versus completely new?

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Guy Yalif (34:09):

My lens is very close to yours. I'll take a half step back. Just you were talking about, by the way, Bravo, you were the top thing that came up when people were querying LLMs and that they told you about it. Forrester surveyed a lot of marketers. Then 95% of them said, "I am going to use an LLM in my buying process this year, B2B buyers." And so it very much supports what you're describing. Oh, on SEO, AEO, I heard unsubstantiated, so I don't know if it's actually happened, but I was like, whoa, that a Fortune 500 CMO fired his or her entire SEO team was like, "We're doing AEO now, not SEO." I could not disagree 180% black and white more because your SEO team is your AEO team. Your SEO agency is your AEO agency because the core skills for this are that.

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(34:58):

52% of Google's citations ranked in the top 10 in search. So good SEO is quite helpful, not required, but quite helpful for AEO and also in part because the LLMs are searching so often. They're literally using search. I think you could at the highest level say, look, SEO minus keyword ranking, because you got to measure differently, plus answering questions and schema, that's AEO. There's more to it. There definitely is more to it, but it's not this radical departure where everything changed because ultimately the goal's the same. You are trying to be useful for a prospect to get them to come to you from another place and buy your stuff. That hasn't changed.

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Tyler Calder (35:39):

I would agree with that. And you've had your own framing for what I'm about to say, but again, going back in the day, I used to talk about the importance of understanding your two audiences, your buyers and the bots. And as long as you could understand both, you're probably going to be in a pretty good position. The one thing that you said that I think I might have a slightly different stance on is this idea of keywords versus questions. And where I'm going with that is I think the best SEOs in the world historically always thought about keywords ask questions. They always thought about it as your job as an SEO is to provide the best answer possible for the questions that are out there. And I think the folks that have nailed that over the past decade, the headstart that they have with AI visibility and ranking, it's wild how quickly they've been able to dominate.

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(36:36):

Now, I think the flip side of that is you can't kind of sit back and wrestle on your laurels with it. I think given how quickly people can outrank you in the LLMs, the folks that are doing well almost accidentally need to keep leaning in and building on that momentum. But yeah, for me, it's always been the best SEOs understand the two audiences, buyers and bots. They've always been into rapid testing and experimentation and not just holding onto the same old stale playbook. And so I agree. I think if you have a solid SEO team in place, an SEO agency, a freelancer, I wouldn't discredit them as a great resource for AEO just because of what you might be reading on LinkedIn. You're probably going to end up making a pretty big mistake in my mind.

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Guy Yalif (37:24):

I agree with your pushback on keywords 1,000% and completely aligned and was giving short shrift to SEO because I'm with you. Great SEO is that it's exactly that and it's a fantastic headstart for AEO. And I'm with you. You should actually not discount your SEO team and agency. You should seek out their help. And I'm totally with you. We've been thinking about the humans who need useful content presented in engaging ways. 94% of first impressions are based on design. People in this age of infinite content like brand and emotion matter a whole lot more and the bots who need clear, well-structured content. I've heard some say, "Well, how do you create content now for both?" There's not some huge divergence in content, I don't think. You fundamentally are sharing the same thing in an engaging way, in a clear and structured way.

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Tyler Calder (38:17):

Yeah, no, agreed. I've got maybe one closing question and we'll link to it, but the four pillars then ladder up into your five levels of maturity. Could you take a couple minutes, just chat through how you came up with those levels, where people can find it and really dig in and assess themselves? Absolutely.

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Guy Yalif (38:38):

We made up a rubric of five different levels for each of those four categories. The made up names for them are you start with keywords, you answer questions, you add structure, you're a pillar of thought leadership, and then you're an authority who's bobbing and weaving with changing things. That gives you basically this grid of these four categories, these five levels. If you go to webflow.com/aeo, you'll see that maturity model with that grid and actionable advice in each of those cells saying, "Hey, here's how to go after this. " We flushed that out in an ebook in a bunch of blog posts most actionably. On that page, if you put in your domain name, we'll run a big 1700 line prompt across a dozen different agents today. We keep enhancing it that we'll go look on your site, off your site and share with you, "Hey, against this rubric, here's what we can see from the outside.

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(39:34):

Here are the gaps we see to get to the next level." And again, from the outside with an LLM, here's what we suggest you go tackle next. No pitch on Webflow, nothing to do with Webflow purely to help elevate all of our AEO fluency so we can go devote our resources to the highest and best use.

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Tyler Calder (39:52):

I love it. We'll certainly link directly to it. I appreciate it and really appreciate the conversation. I think there's a lot here for people to take away. Guy, if people wanted to maybe follow up with any questions, how might they go do that? What's the best way to do that? LinkedIn. Yeah. Okay, perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you, sir. I think what you're doing over at Webflow is certainly commendable and is something that the whole space needs as we all learn together. So appreciate it.

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Guy Yalif (40:20):

I am grateful that you'd have me on and it's fun to talk shop with you.

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Tyler Calder (40:24):

All right. Thank you, sir.

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Guy Yalif (40:26):

Thank you.

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Tyler Calder (40:27):

Thanks for listening to Get It, Together. If you want more resources to help you build and scale your partnership program, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app and get more proven tips and tools at partnerstack.com/getitogether.

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